The Road Not Taken
by UnofficialLurker
Summary: AU. After the finale. A second chapter from Wendy's POV now added, and a third from Jax. (previously called "My father")
1. Chapter 1

Note: Don't own anything. Only written for myself, and anyone who might want to read it.

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My father was a quiet man. He spent his days working, then came home, had his dinner, and sat in front of the fire. I asked him what he saw in there once, and he smiled at me, but wouldn't answer. My mother took me and my brother out of the room, and told me not to ask again. I was eleven at the time.

When I was twelve, I asked about my father's tattoos. He told me they were memories of the man he had been, and a reminder to never be that man again. He said the same when my brother asked about the scars on his ribs.

When I was almost fourteen, my mother got a letter from California. She read it sitting at the kitchen table. That evening, she sat in my father's lap in front of the fire while he read her letter. He went out that night, and when he came back the next day, he seemed at the same time very sad and lighter than before. He laughed more after that day.

When I was sixteen, I bought a motorcycle; an old, broken-down one. I asked my father to help me fix it. He refused, and when I took my first ride, he walked away as soon as the bike started. He cried in front of the fire that night. He never touched the bike, and would not look at me when I rode it. My mother said it brought bad memories, but she wouldn't tell me more.

When I was eighteen, I went away to college. My father told me he had never been prouder of me, and that he knew I would make something great of myself. He drove me, and helped me carry my things to my dorm. I left the bike at home for my brother, but he never rode it. My mother sold it, and gave me the money.

When I was twenty-eight my first child was born, and when my father held my daughter the first time, he cried and smiled through his tears. He said she had the eyes of his first love, the eyes of my brother's mother. He doted on her, and she on him.

When I was forty, my father sat me and my brother down and told us a lifetime of smoking had caught up with him. Even in his seventies, my father had seemed indomitable to me, and I could hardly believe he would die. He said he didn't mind so much. He had done so much bad, and so much good in his lifetime, and he had had all the important things. He told us he had loved and been loved by two strong, beautiful women, had two sons he was so proud of. He told us he was content. My mother held his hand.

After my father died, my brother and I helped our mother go through his things. We found envelopes with photographs. They showed my father riding a motorcycle, my father wearing a leather vest my mother told me was called a cut. They showed my father with a brunette woman my mother told me was my brother's first mom. She told me that woman had been called Tara Knowles, and my father had loved her so much. She told me of my father then, of his life in Charming, California. She told me of love and hate, and she told me that maybe my father hadn't been a good man in his youth, but he had tried to be. He hadn't always done the right thing, but he had tried to. She told me she loved him, and he had loved her. She never told me what happened to my grandmother, who was in pictures with me, and I am glad of it. I don't want to know.

My father was a quiet man. Not because he had nothing to tell, but because he wanted to forget. He wanted to listen to his sons having the life he knew he would never have. After he died, I knew why he doted on my daughter who so reminded him the woman he had loved and who had been torn from him because of his lifestyle. I knew why he was so happy I went to college and took a route so different from his, even though I didn't know how different until then. I knew why he couldn't look at or touch my bike, not because he didn't like it, as I had thought, but because he _missed_ riding himself. I knew what his tattoos reminded him of, and something of the man he had been and both missed and hated. I knew then what he saw in the fire. He saw a young man on a motorcycle. A woman with brown hair, wearing scrubs. Men in cuts, riding with him on the highways. He saw crows flying free.

My father was many things. He was an outlaw, he was a killer, he was a widower, he was a husband, he was a father, and a grandfather. He loved and he hated. And he never forgave himself for what he had done.

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Thank you for reading, and I hope you had some enjoyment from this story. Please, tell me what you think, even just a word or two. It would make me happy.


	2. Winner, Coming Second

It took years before she even started to truly believe he loved her. She knew she was second choice, or possibly not even that. Just there because it was the easiest way. She won the man, the children. Winner, coming in second.

At first, when he was mad with grief, and she struggling to connect with her son and the baby, it hadn't mattered all that much. But later, when the first, mind-numbing rage and grief had died out in him, she had started to think about a future. And wonder what she, they, would ever be anything real. But it still didn't matter that much. She wasn't sure if she loved him, either. There was so much _bad, _so much ugly between them, after all.

She threw a plate at him when he told her what he had planned. Going out like his father before him, joining his dead love, dead best friend. But in the end, the children had mattered too much, and the club had allowed him to go. Some leeway could, after all, be given to a man whose mother had murdered his wife. After the shattered plate was cleaned up, they both, separately, came to realise that now they only had each other. Staying with his mother's lover was, after all that had happened, not something they could be comfortable with. So they left, moved on to anew place, where no one knew of them.

They built a new life, a quiet life. Eventually, they bought a house, big enough to fit two adults and two growing boys. They both worked, made friends. He was struggling with learning to live like people outside the club, to solve problems in a new way. She could support him in that. And they had the boys. That was the glue, really. He knew he was too broken to raise two children on his own, and she wouldn't ever give her son up again. And she owed a dead woman to care for her son, like that woman had cared for her own. Caring for the man just came with the rest.

Sometime during those first, difficult years, she discovered she still loved him. Or maybe loved him again, she wasn't sure. Either way, she didn't tell him. He told her he loved her, but she knew he said it because he believed he should. They married again three years into their new life.

As they boys grew up, went to school, played sports, made friends, she watched him heal. And did some healing of her own, as well. They became friends, something they had never been before, not really. And she took pride in knowing that she didn't need him. She loved him, could admit that to herself and sometimes, in bed, to him, but she could go on without him.

Their friends never really noticed anything. They found him unsettling, just a little bit scary. Some found him exciting. She understood that, but didn't like it. They didn't talk about it, and she did trust him. Funny that, really.

Sometime during the years, they way he looked at her changed. She didn't notice it herself, not really. But one day, sorting pictures into albums, she saw that he had started to look at her with a certain softness he never had before. Not even during their beginning, before their first marriage.

Over the years, living with him, fighting, laughing, talking, screaming, sleeping, sharing everything with him, there was a small bitterness in her heart. She loved him, but she was second choice. Winner, coming in second. And he had claimed to always, always only love one woman. And she was the one who had to tell that woman's son about her. She did, sparingly. Just enough that he knew she had existed, and she had loved him. That was as much as she could bear to give. After all, she and Tara hand never been, could never have been, friends. Too much baggage, too much wanting the same thing.

When he came back from driving their second boy to college, he told her that he was grateful to her. For being there. And that he loved her. She still wasn't sure if she believed him, or if she could take the doubt any longer. So she told him that now, he didn't need her for the boys any more. They were starting out on their own. And he stared at her. Then he smiled at her, and hugged her. And told her that yes, she wasn't his big love story, his mad, all-consuming passion. But she was his rock. His home, and his quiet love. Not a wildfire, but candlelight.

And finally, after more than fifteen years together, when he told her he loved her, she believed him.


	3. Living on

It takes months before he really understands he is alive. She's not. The wrongness of that shakes him to his core. For all his sins, he is the one who lives. Cruel and unusual punishment, this life after the death of his love. But the boys matter too much. More than he does, more than she even, though he flinches from the thought. Certainly more than his desire to go. During those months of life unlike everything he has ever experienced, when he drinks too much, smokes even more, it's Wendy who holds everything together. The junkie whore he married because he was lonely, and soon despised for being weak. Now, she's the stronger of them, becoming a mother to two boys who have lived through way more than they ever should have, managing him, and starting to build a life. He follows meekly, no strength left now that he's no longer driven by white-hot fury and hate and all that's left is black grief.

When he starts coming up, coming back, he tells her everything; secrets never seem to work out too well in the Teller family. She almost brains him with a plate. But in the evening, when he reads to his boys, she stands half-hidden in the doorway and listens. When the boys have fallen asleep, she takes his hand and leads him to bed. She holds him when he cries.

His first wedding had been his mother's making. He had been drunk, and mostly interested in the wedding night. His second took place in a brothel, just before he was arrested. His third, and last, is small with only the boys there. A part of him wishes for the club to be there, but he knows that he can't go back, even a little. Still, it's one more regret.

The boys are his only joy for a long time. He works as a mechanic, slowly progressing from a decent one to a good one, but refuses to work on bikes. That still hurts too much, makes him chafe against what he is becoming. He makes sure to be home when they boys are, as much as possible. She understands, or at least says she does. He is grateful for that, knows she is as hungry for time with them as he is, but he's not yet able to be generous to her in return. That comes later.

He tries to cover his tattoos, his scars. Small boys are curious, and he doesn't know what to say, how to explain the black blotches on his body. Eventually, of course, they ask. He tries to answer, without telling them anything. By now, he fears how they will react when they find out who he was. The shame plagues him, as much over what he has done as over how much he misses it.

Leaving Abel at school that first day shatters him. They had talked about it, him and _her. _He still struggles with even thinking her name. It's Wendy who tells the boys about her, but never much. It's raw for both of them. He calls in sick, spends the day in a bottle of bad whiskey. Same when it's Thomas.

The other parents are wary of him, some even afraid. He enjoys it more than he should, he knows that, but he can't help thinking about how these stuck-up office workers would react if they knew what he'd been.

Wendy is his rock. Something he never would have thought possible. He appreciates her more than he can say, and it saddens him that she doesn't believe him. But he still wakes up and expects brown hair on the pillow next to him, only for the first fractions of time before his brain catches up with him. He loves that she sits in his lap, especially when their sons (because by now, that's what they are) have friends over, and get horribly embarrassed. She teases him about it and claims it's a good thing they don't have daughters. He secretly disagrees.

A bit more than a decade after they left Charming, Wendy gets a letter. Chibs, who is the only one who knows where they are, sent it on, but Ellie Winston wrote it. Knowing that his best friend's family are fine, that the chaos and destruction he was part of wrecking in their lives is over and they came out whole, lifts a burden off his shoulders he didn't know he carried, still.

His son buys a motorcycle when he's sixteen. And it's a wreck. Like anyone who buys a wrecked bike and is related to a mechanic would, Abel asks him for help. His first instinct is to refuse. He hasn't touched a bike since Charming, and is oddly afraid of what it will do to him. Wendy calls him an idiot. He still refuses, though he watches more carefully than Abel realises when the boy works on it. And is grateful that Thomas is more interested in art than engines, and the bike is sold when Abel leaves for college and is no longer interested in keeping it. He misses the open roads every day, and a cage will never satisfy him.

He and Wendy are a unit by now, tied together by years of shared life and ambitions, as well as a past they keep carefully hidden. The junkie and the outlaw isn't a stigma they want for the boys. He is uncomfortable with how he feels about her; he never really believed that he could fall in love, truly, with more than one person. And for him, that happened when he was sixteen and sweet Tara Knowles with a backbone of steel started smiling at him. But Wendy is there, and though what he feels for her isn't the same, not even close, it's every bit as real. It bothers him, but he tries to not to think about it. It was never a certain moment he fell in love with her, like it was with Tara. This love grew, from need, at first, from companionship and familiarity, later. Over the years, he realises he no longer lies when he tells her he loves her. He wonders if she means it, when she tells him she loves him, since she only does when they're in bed. He wonders why that matters. By now, they are strong together, neither carrying the other. A change from their first marriage, and the first time in this relationship.

Then Thomas leaves for college too, and she tells him she knows they got together because they were both there, and now, they boys don't need them as much anymore. That's when he knows she hasn't believed him all the times he's told her he loved her the past fifteen years. He promises himself to make sure she never wonders again. He still mourns Tara, always will.

His sons grow up, and start their own life. Thomas marries a cop, and he doesn't quite know what to do with himself at the wedding, surrounded by people in dress uniforms. How does a former outlaw act around cops when they are no longer in opposition? Old habits stick, and he has never liked how the schools tell his children to go to the police for help. That's what family is for. Abel marries as well, and he finds himself falling in love harder than he ever had before in his life when he first holds his granddaughter. That's when he starts to understand, but not forgive, his own mother, and her fears.

He knows he should tell his sons about himself, and about Tara. But he can't. When he finds out he has lung cancer, and there is nothing more that can be done, he makes Wendy promise to tell them when he is gone. She does, but not until she's made him swear to fight as long and as hard as he can. He asks her what else he would do. He might not be a Son any more, but Tellers don't go down without a fight. Even though he has broken the tradition of dying young, there are more than one way to die bloody and some fights don't include fists, knives, or bullets. He does fight, and gains a greater respect for Wayne Unser. He tells his sons, in an uncharacteristic moment of openness that he doesn't die without regrets, but that he is so proud of them. And that he is content with what his life has brought. He is slightly surprised it isn't a lie.


End file.
